The manly history of a ‘girls' sport’: Gender, class and the development of nineteenth-century figure skating

Now widely perceived as a 'girls' sport', figure skating was once the exclusive pastime of upper-class men. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, skating allowed privileged men to exhibit their grace and elegance, essential characteristics of a refined manly character. But notions of manliness change over time and, with the rise of Victorianism, definitions of grace and elegance narrowed to fit better with middle-class ideas about masculinity and male bodies. After the 1830s, English skating evolved into a kind of regimented team sport, more science than art. This paper analyses the transformation of English figure skating and contrasts the unexpressive 'poker style' – knees were not to bend, arms were not to move – of English skaters with the more expressive and artistic skating that was emerging in other parts of Europe. The paper uses figure skating as a means of exploring the relationship of masculinity to discourses about class and national identities. The paper draws primarily on instructional skating texts from Britain, with additional sources from Canada, the United States, Germany, Austria and France.